


it's a bitch existence some sundays

by 7thchoir



Category: Castlevania (Cartoon)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, And it's stretched out like saltwater taffy, Apocalypse, Friendship, Gen, Non-Linear Narrative, Or at least: the apocalypse and their relationships with each other are developing at the same time, Road Trips
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-08
Updated: 2019-05-08
Packaged: 2020-02-28 12:23:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,647
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18756370
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/7thchoir/pseuds/7thchoir
Summary: "Why is it," Trevor gripes, switching radio stations with the speed of a man confronted with an over-played song, "that the only thing that's not shit with static is the Christian sermon station?""Divine punishment," says Adrian, voice muffled as he holds a scrunchie in his mouth, putting his hair up into a half-mess of a French braid."If you break my radio," Sypha warns, "I'm turning this car around."





	it's a bitch existence some sundays

**Author's Note:**

> i haven't written fanfiction since 2015. rip.
> 
> this might suck, but i'm doing this for me. hope you guys like it anyway!
> 
> title is from "the preacher addresses the seminarians" by [christian wiman](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57864/the-preacher-addresses-the-seminarians)
> 
>  
> 
> _I tell you it's a bitch existence some Sundays_  
>  and it's no good pretending you don't have to pretend 

**MONTH 3, DAY 6: mutter a verse for the end times!**

The world is ending.

Or, that’s what people are saying, at least. Life goes on, but tentatively.

Sypha counts at least three jaws that snarl open to reveal a hellfire blue— the footage is shaky, so she’s not sure. The cameraman is standing inside what looks like an office, and the demon is crawling along the glass, gaze trained at terrified men in suits. The demon looks too much like a Siberian husky to be properly frightening (in her honest opinion), but then its maws open wider, jutting out and filling. She’s reminded, a little, of worn-down library books with pictures of deep sea creatures.

It’s kinda cool until the demon starts spitting acid.

The TV volume was muted by the sole employee stupid-brave enough to come to work that night, so she can’t hear the screaming that she knows existed on the other side of the camera.

“Well,” Trevor says, slumping further into his seat, now that a toothpaste commercial slides its way into view. His voice is the only sound in the empty restaurant, save for the hum of the lights overhead. “Glad to see we didn’t miss much.” He scratches at his stubble, at the long scar winding down his cheek.

Adrian (she’s still not sure what to call him, so in her head, she calls him Adrian) doesn’t say anything. He’s brooding, as Trevor likes to say, staring out into the dark. It’s not a bad idea, nowadays, to look out into the night and try to make out the shape of a demon from a motorcycle. The night is filled with an awful kind of danger, nowadays.

Sypha decides, as she picks up another french fry to shove into her mouth, that she doesn’t have much to say, either.

Trevor looks between the two of them and makes a face she doesn’t quite understand before taking a long pull of soda from his straw. “What a rousing attempt at conversation, Trevor,” he says in a high-pitched voice that Sypha thinks is supposed to mimic her own. “Oh thanks, I try my best.”

She contemplates throwing a fry at his face but isn’t willing to risk the failure that would come with Trevor catching it in his mouth.

She’s too tired for it.

The fry burns her tongue and the roof of her mouth. The employee made it fresh, and told them to take the lot of it, because, and she quotes, “Fuck my manager and fuck this shit. Take whatever you want. I’m watching anime in the supply room.” Trevor demolished half of it easily within the first five minutes.

She savors it, the grease and the salt. Four days straight on the road, breaking speed limits no one cared about anymore— well. Not _no one_ . They get pulled over once by the only cop for _miles_ , but Adrian flashed his fangs and they were off again on their merry way. There are no words to describe the feeling of consuming granola bars and 5 Hour Energies, covered with crumbs and the sickly sweet and the _bickering._

Four whole days of flying down the near barren lanes in the comfort of day, then the sooty dark, Trevor pointing at the GPS that says to _take the next ramp,_ Adrian pointing at the stars that say _that way is north_ , and Sypha yelling that the next person to backseat drive was getting booted immediately.

Adrian doesn’t drive. He offered this skill deficit upfront, first hour of the first day of the first month. He is, however, an excellent navigator and a pleasant conversationalist when he’s not watching the roads flit by with an intense and cold quiet.

Trevor drives, too, mostly on the empty stretches of highway between abandoned city and suburb. He’s scarily good at ignoring highway hypnosis. He took the back seat, most times, and when they switched out, the fatigue getting too unbearable, the blankets held his space-heater warmth. It’s surprising, a little, in the gaps between dreaming and waking, that she never heard a single argument coming from the front seats.

Sypha drives the most—as much as Trevor likes to argue that he’s good (which she’ll admit), she’s better.

She knows how to parallel park.

* * *

It feels like agony getting back into the car. The fifteen minutes it takes to get to the motel is an eternity, but the neon sign of the Wayward Rest signals the comforts of an old bed, scratchy blankets, and the lingering smell of tobacco despite the signs that plead, to no avail, No Smoking Allowed.

Oh, Sypha cannot fucking _wait_.

“I’ll check us in,” she says, unbuckling her seatbelt and speaking through a yawn.

“Did you want some company?” It’s the first time Adrian has spoken in hours, but it comes out smooth, practiced, and polite. He’s good at that, being polite. It’s funny, and irritating, to know this and then see him joyously throw himself into his and Trevor’s well-rehearsed sniping.

“Don’t think I can take care of myself?” she says jokingly, knowing full well that they’ve seen her incinerate her fair share of enemies.

Adrian seems to be on the same wavelength, saying, “I think we all know you can take care of yourself.”

A pause. “Come on, then.” It’s a surprisingly cool night for midsummer, and the chill hits her the second her car door opens. She shivers and looks to the sky, where the stars look brighter than they ever did back home.

“Hey,” says Trevor, who managed to doze off between pulling out of the restaurant parking lot and Sypha cutting the engine, “assholes, don’t fucking ditch me.”

“Oh, Belmont,” Adrian says as he exits the car, “if only there was something to ditch.”

“Hush.” She elbows Adrian, who has the decency to look ever so slightly cowed. “Only nice boys get to use the shower.”

* * *

They have a routine of sorts, when it comes to motels. They’ve stayed at enough of them to know that the bathroom goes to Trevor first, because he does the least, Adrian second, because his hair is the stuff of gods and takes forever to dry, and Sypha last because— Well. Because she’s allowed to be selfish. She doesn’t mind waiting in her own grime as long as she gets a second to herself.

She hears the shower faintly sputter to life— even Trevor, as inclined as he is to be stinky, has limits.

She looks over to Adrian, who always naturally appears in a state of sated, pretentious recline. He reminds her of a bored, sickly Adonis.

She follows his gaze— ah, the TV again. He’s watching it with a look of carefully constructed inattentiveness, but his hands are restless in his lap, drumming his fingers and picking at his skin.

On the screen, the castle appears briefly, before it cuts to a shot of glass and rubble, and then a middle-aged blonde white woman staring into the camera very seriously. Behind her is a pile of flesh burning in a pyre— demons, more likely than people. The smoke is a diseased, awful blue.

Though the logical part of her mind tells her she should find the entirety of this frightening, she finds herself fascinated. She had so many questions during the first few days about the castle, the engine, its place between time and space. She had questions for Trevor, too, about his family, their knowledge and legacy. She’s done, now, but not because she’s weary of asking. But because she feels like she’s picking at someone’s still-raw scab by mentioning any of it at all.

On the TV, something dark splatters into something red into something green and viscous. There’s someone crying on the audio.

Sypha reaches for the TV remote and rapidly clicks through channels until she finds the most inoffensive show about Giant Pacific octopuses, narrated by what sounded like the world’s sleepiest mollusk scientist.

Adrian turns his head and looks at her, lids low over his eyes, and she looks at him straight on. Not for the first time, she thinks that his eyes are like the yellow of the moon.

“We can’t afford to be uninformed.” She doesn’t say that there’s no information in watching the same footage of people getting gobbled up.

“It’ll be there tomorrow,” she insists. “Let’s just— give it a rest, for now. We’ve come a long way.” Then— “What do you call a mollusk scientist?”

“A teuthologist,” he answers without skipping a beat.

There’s a loud _CRASH_ paired with Trevor cursing, and the bathroom door bursts open with thunder. “I hope you and your children rot in Hell,” he snarls, kicking at a lump of wet cloth on the ground. Sypha blinks— he’s attacking a towel.

She stares at him, and she guesses Adrian is, too, because Trevor flushes from the neck up.  “I slipped,” he concedes, with absolutely no grace, glaring at Adrian as if daring him to say something else. And, like the well-timed chime of a grandfather clock—

“With every word that exits your mouth,” Adrian says, summoning the low tones of his sarcastic disinterest, “it further cements my disbelief that you survived infancy.”

“Oh, eat my _entire—”_

In any other circumstance, Sypha would have shushed them— it is, after all, nearly 2 AM. But she doubts anyone is around to complain about them to the kindly old woman who sits behind the counter, armed with a shotgun and cheerily eating sunflower seeds.

* * *

**MONTH 3, DAY 7: stating the obvious.**

The morning comes with no fanfare, and Adrian is already awake. One of the things that Trevor likes about him, which he’ll never admit in the light of day, is that he’s considerate enough not to go slamming doors at daybreak. “Belmont,” he says the second that Trevor decides he _maybe_ wants to open his eyes.

“Bastard,” he replies back, rubbing the crust from his eyes. “Time?”

“Barely past 8:30.” The sunlight leaking in from the window is weak and when Adrian pulls back the curtain a fraction, Trevor doesn’t even need to shield his face. Adrian looks pale in the grey cast, unmoving as he stares outside.

“It’s going to rain,” Adrian says, without a hint of doubt. It annoys Trevor because, firstly, it’s pretty damn obvious, and secondly, that means that there’s no way that the fucker could be wrong.

And Adrian does _oh so love_ being correct.

“Shut up,” mumbles Sypha from the other side of the bed, half-heartedly reaching over and smacking Trevor on the arm. “Shut up, the both of you. It’s too early.”

The rumpled sleepiness of her wild, honey-colored hair and pillow wrinkled cheeks just makes him more inclined to fall back into bed and let the blankets eclipse him.  
**  
** Trevor’s not a fool— he remembers the years he spent stealing the family grimoire from its place on a marble pedestal, reading it under his covers with a flashlight clenched between his teeth. _Dhampir_ , one page read, _the result of the unholiest of unions._ Though, as a wee lad, he hadn’t been taught what “unholy unions” meant exactly, he found himself sneaking into the library to stare at small skulls with fangs barely bigger than regular baby incisors. Then, he’d tried to bite himself until he bled (just for the sake of it, y’know) and regretted that decision rather quickly.

Though Sypha was eager to have her prophesied soldier, Trevor could practically hear his forefathers rolling in their graves and clawing at the caskets.

Trusting Adrian took two weeks of barely sleeping, covering his neck with sweaty palms, culminating in a regrettably impressive moment when Adrian narrowly saved his left arm by throwing his sword like a spear into the mouth-hole of something that looked like a devilish Big Bird. He’d grunted out a “I could’ve handled it,” to which Adrian had answered with a dramatic turn of his head, a narrowing of his eyes, and a snide message about keeping his arms attached.

But he earned a smidge of trust that day, and now Trevor falls asleep in full sight of the son of his family’s greatest enemy.

Oh, Christ. He must be such a disappointment.

* * *

**month 1, day 27: drum your fingers to the beat of uncertainty.**

The only child of the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter, Sypha confessed on the solemn drive to the Belmont estate. They were on a narrow road, full of snake-curved hills, the trees bent over like old men, watching them wind their way through the night.

Trevor was actually the one driving for once— Sypha agreed that it was more logical to let him navigate through his old hills. It felt like tracing a birthmark. He knew them in his sleep.

“My grandfather told me that my mother couldn't wait to see what I would be, if I would defy her visions,” she said, in a soft voice. He strained to hear her over the rush of the air conditioning. “Her dreams were prophetic, it was amazing what she knew about me. She told my grandfather that my future was hazy, and that she was excited to see it all.”

“And then she…?”

“And then she died.” Sypha nodded once at this. The passing glow of street lamps threw her round face into shadow. “And I never thought to figure out about my dad. I wondered for a long time if he was still alive, but I’m not sad about it. My grandfather was the one who raised me.”

“Parents,” Trevor supplied helpfully, smothering the memories of a much younger man, “can't depend on them to stick around or stay alive.” He sounded bitter and felt it, too, down his throat and in his chest.

There was a long silence, and he could practically hear her chewing up his words in her brain. He looked into the rearview mirror, where Adrian was curled up on the backseat like the world’s worst cat. The waves of his hair, visible in the fleeting light, caught on the old upholstery, curling down the curve of the seat and probably onto the floor. He hadn’t known that dhampir needed to sleep— it was, actually, the first time he had fallen asleep in the car.

Trevor looked away.

“Trevor,” Sypha said after a while.

“Hm? Yeah?”

“Do you think your parents would approve of what we’re doing now?”

He snorted. “Without a doubt.”

“Does it help,” she said, slowly as if not to spook him, “knowing that?”

“Knowing what?”

“That whatever we’re doing, like hunting, searching, or— or I don’t know, just trying to help. Does it help you, knowing that they would approve of what you’re doing?”

He thought back to the cheap beer Sypha made him throw away, because she had said she needed him sober for this. He wished he had it now. “If you think I’m doing this for someone’s approval,” he said, strangling the wheel in his white-knuckled grip, “you might want to reconsider. My parents were what I needed to be what I am now. But don’t fucking take that for gratitude.”

A silence had fallen, then, and so quiet that he almost couldn’t hear it: “You can talk about it, you know.”

Trevor did what he did best— deflect. It was, after all, what his own dad did. He held back from saying _Emotional vulnerability is the one monster my family taught me to ignore,_ and instead turned on the radio. “No talking while Cyndi Lauper’s on. She’s my favorite,” he lied and made no effort to sound remotely truthful, though he could openly appreciate the signal holding on all the way in buttfuck nowhere.

As he glanced in the rearview mirror, he found Adrian’s open eyes peering over the patchwork green of the blanket, golden as a star, as Lauper’s croon lilted through the car.

**Author's Note:**

> come talk to me on [my writing/side blog](https://titanomach.tumblr.com/) OR [my main](https://sejci.tumblr.com/)!


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